Last Train to Gloryhole (44 page)

I passed it to her with her glasses, and, dismayed, went off to the kitchen to make us tea.

‘Ooh! There’s some gorgeous baby-clothes in here, sweetheart,’ I heard her say from the other room. ‘Come and have a look, love.’

‘Baby-clothes!’ I screamed, almost spilling the kettle. ‘I think we’re a bit old for new additions to the Cook family, don’t you think, dear?’

‘Why is that?’ she asked. ‘I mean Rhiannon is already seventeen, and, personally, I’d like nothing better than to become a grand-mother before it’s finally time for me to go. I’m surprised you don’t feel the same, Arthur.’

I gritted my teeth. That bloody name again! ‘Well, I don’t!’ I replied sharply.

‘Our daughter is blooming right now,’ she told me. ‘And since she doesn’t want to stay on at school much longer, well, I believe it would make good sense if she decided to settle down with some nice young man who felt likewise, don’t you think? Just like I did all those years ago. I mean with Richard.’

I was stupefied by this. My daughter - a mother! I couldn’t - no - I refused to see it.

‘Our Rhiannon would make the most wonderful mother, I’m sure,’ she went on. ‘Yes, I was only seventeen when I first left home, and then my gorgeous Olwen was born less than a year later.’

By Olwen, Gwen was referring to her much older daughter, who she’d had with her first husband, Richard, and who had lived in London now for many years. Although the woman’s first-name was Sarah, Olwen was her, rarely used, middle name. And I heard she now refused to retain her runaway-father’s surname - Plant - and had reverted to her mother’s original, Havard.

‘These little jump-suits look adorable,’ I soon heard Gwen declare. ‘Oh, there’s no point in telling you, I know, Arthur, but I must remember to show Rhiannon when she gets in. She’ll love them, I just know she will.’

‘And where has she gone tonight, anyway?’ I enquired from the other room. ‘I mean, I know summer is almost here, but -’

‘Look, we both know she’s out seeing that boy from
Gloryhole
, don’t we?’ she announced, ‘even though she thinks we don’t really know about it. And he’s a nice enough chap, I suppose - that Christopher. Yes, I’d say that my darling girl seems about to start nesting, don’t you think?’

‘Nesting!’ I bawled back. ‘Our Rhiannon!’

‘You heard me, dear.’

‘Well, she’s already off to a good start, if you ask me,’ I told her, carrying a tray bearing two mugs and a full plate of biscuits back into the lounge. ‘I mean, her bedroom already resembles a hole in a tree-trunk, stuffed full, as it is, with food wrapping, straws, and old newspapers.’

‘I wonder how many she’ll get to have in the end?’ Gwen asked, closing her eyes.

‘Newspapers, or boyfriends?’ I enquired, chuckling.

‘No - children, silly,’ she retorted. ‘Twins would be nice, don’t you think, Arthur? But, there again, triplets would be even better.’

‘I can see them all now,’ I told Gwen, resuming my seat beside her.

‘Can you, really?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I told her, sipping my tea. ‘The bigger ones pushing the little one out of the nest. Something off the
Nature Channel
, don’t you think? Not very unlike this family of mine, really.’

‘Oh, don’t be like that, Arthur,’ Gwen told me, smiling. ‘I’d simply love to see Rhiannon’s little fledgings emerging into the world. Yes, that would make me so happy, so blissfully happy. You see, wait for my Olwen and you’ll wait forever.’

At least Gwen was right there, I thought. I’d been told by different people around town that her elder daughter was lesbian, although her mother had for long remained in denial of the fact. Perhaps, nowadays, I thought, Gwen was at last denying it no longer.

‘The birds of Rhiannon!’ Gwen suddenly exclaimed, slowly biting into her jaffa-cake, and sitting with her head thrown right back on the linen head-cloth, her eyes tightly closed. ‘The glorious birds of Rhiannon! I have long felt I knew them, but how I’d love to see them now. Listen - do you think we soon will, Arthur? Tell me, honestly, now, my love. Do you think we soon will?’

Chris stood and watched as the sky stuck forks of lightning into the salad of trees on the distant horizon, and then set off, at a rambler’s gait, to the meeting-place that he hadn’t even known existed, with the drugs he had grown stuffed into a gore-tex bag strapped to his back. To Chris, at first, this excursion seemed a task as Sisyphean as attempting to repair all the things that were wrong with his parents’ house, and which his step-father seemed disinclined to do anything about, but he had convinced himself that he had no alternative but to set off across the hills and try. He recalled how he had once smuggled two dozen lock-knives through Dover to supply all his classmates at
Pennant,
who told him they hadn’t the sort of money that his own family clearly had to afford the History-trip to the World-War-One battle-grounds. And, having achieved his objective, he had then honoured the fallen in his own unique way, with the shallow trench he had dug in his neighbour’s back-garden, the very night he returned to Wales, to conceal them all in.

Carla’s very latest offer, to purchase from him all the crack-cocaine he had been lumbered with, as well as what remained of the bud crop he had managed to cultivate in their loft. was terribly unfair on her, in spite of her considerable wealth, he told himself, and inexcusable on his part too, in that he never wished to feel, or be seen to be, dependent on anyone in life, least of all a woman, and least of all this particular one. In truth, Chris was desperate to display to Carla just how independent and self-reliant he could actually be, and how ingenious and discreet were his skills of entrepreneurship, and his modus operandi, if not so, perhaps, his connections.

To Chris’s mind, only returning along the same path later that afternoon bearing a fat handful of paper in his back-pocket would suffice. Such was his fresh sense of self-dependence, he mused. Rounding the curve that would lead him down into the tributary stream’s shallow valley, he felt the first spots of cold rain collide with his bare fore-head, but, though foolishly under-dressed, alone, and lacking a map of any kind, he was still confident that he would pull it off.

The red tractor, that was the source of the incessant, whirring sound that interrupted his thoughts, could eventually be sighted between the trees, circling at speed round the enormous, field above and to the right of him. Without thinking, Chris waved nonchalantly at the bearded, middle-aged farmer who was driving it, just as he would have done a thousand times before. But on this particular, far from normal, occasion, he suddenly wished that he hadn’t done.

A hundred yards further on, a mating pair of magpies landed on either side of the undulating track he was traversing, and, to Chris’s dismay, declined to desert it, even though he trudged his heavy, laced-up boots as noisily as he could manage just yards between them. God! Is this an evil omen, then? Chris pondered, and suddenly remembered the Swansea City footballer, who, having forgotten his shin-guards, and having returned to the dressing-room to collect them, came out onto the pitch as last man in his team, and promptly suffered a broken-leg! ‘Well, I won’t
let it
be a wicked portent,’ he announced to the wind, and, looking back, repeated in a shout to the two magpies, at which point the twin birds hopped once or twice, then took flight.

Following the stream north now, along its narrow, stony bed, that would normally be lying flooded in water, even this late in May, Chris felt in his jeans-pocket for some chocolate, a packet of mints, or some gum, in fact anything he could slip into his mouth for sustenance, but all that he could find was a folded piece of glossy paper that, when he opened it up, read -
‘Play for free - Win for real.’
‘Yeah, and lose for certain!’ Chris exclaimed with a sneer, rolling it into a ball, and throwing it into the gently flowing stream, and watching it drift slowly downstream.

Chris ran the fingers of both hands back through his hair, and told himself how he felt like he was a person of two dimensions seeking freedom in a third. Life in the U.K. was fast becoming devoid of hope for young people like himself, he mused. For a start, British TV had become just like radio, only a hundred times worse. The country that meekly followed every auto-tuned moment and every phony turn, of
‘X-Factor,’
while the world around it went up in flames, seemed fully deserving of the grim future that awaited it. It was no wonder young people like himself desired ‘the quick fix.’ Where were the jobs that David Cameron and his Con-Dem associates had promised would be created by them? he pondered. And what had happened to the free university-education Nick Clegg and his cabinet friends had put their signatures to less than a year earlier, and that it now seemed certain they had done just so they could reward themselves with the briefest, and thinnest sliver of political power? Chris feared this might cost him dear.

In fact, who
could
you trust these days? Chris asked himself, as the stream-bed suddenly came to an end, and he was forced to climb up between tangled branches of dwarf-oak that camouflaged the small cataract sitting beneath it, and pursue what was left of the watery track that led to the strange, secluded, rendez-vous point.

Very soon the stream itself could be seen to flow out from a perfectly formed, limestone cave that Chris felt he may have passed once or twice, but had never previously had the courage to enter, let alone explore. But this aperture into the mountain landscape now seemed to him to cry out to be penetrated fully at some future date, when he arrived at the scene better prepared than he was today, and could change into wellington-boots so as to wade inside, and, by the light of a torch, that he didn’t presently possess, explore its deepest, and most tantalising extremities.

Quite alone, and around a mile or two from civilisation, an exuberant Chris chose to hold an animated conversation with himself. ‘Wow! So this is what some people round here call
‘Merlin’s Cave!’
he called out. It’s entrance may be narrow, he thought, but how perfect and symmetrical it is. And the sound that the clear, fresh-water stream makes as it seeps out, bubbling joyously into the bright daylight can’t help but remind you of something out of ‘
The Arabian Nights
.’ As Daddy Drew is often heard to say, these days it seems that the only place you can still find beauty is where its persecutors have somehow overlooked it.

Leaning on a boulder, Chris bent over and shook the stones from out of one of his boots, and then turned and proceeded to duck and weave his way further up the, now dry, valley in the hope that he might encounter the elusive pair, whom his parents had separately, and forcefully, warned him about - Steffan Jones and Jake Haines - who would, he believed, enable him to become financially solvent again, and perhaps help him set down the foundations for his intended, but, sadly these days, far from inexpensive, university education over the border in England. ‘A lot hangs on what happens this afternoon,’ he told himself. ‘And if I have to stay here until it gets dark to earn my bread, then I’m pretty sure that that is what I shall do.’

An hour or so later, hearing not a sound except the constant babble of the pure, clear, emergent stream, as it coursed across the limestone pebbles towards him, and then turned to flow away down towards the riverside path by which he had arrived, Chris elected to approach the intriguing cave-entrance. He soon noticed that someone had written something in small, painted capitals on the sheer, calcareous wall to the right. In order to read what it said, Chris found that he needed to splay his legs, wide and uncomfortably, on two sharp, narrow rock-ledges that were cut into the walls on either side of the narrow stream. Eventually gaining the position he sought, Chris soon found that he was able to run the fingers of his right hand along the cold, dry text that sloped gently before his eyes, and almost instantly was able to decipher the Welsh words -
BEDD ARTHUR
.

Chris turned his awkwardly balanced torso round and peered deep into the hollow, watery darkness beyond him, and spoke the two words again, aloud this time. ‘
Bedd Arthur!’
he called out
.
The sound he made echoed eerily inside the cave. He repeated the action three or four more times, at varying volume and tone, then ceased, and began pondering the meaning of the bizarre inscription that he had found. How strange, Chris thought, that a local person might claim in this way that the so-called
‘Merlin’s Cave’
retained within its confines the actual resting place, and therefore the bodily remains, of the man the whole world knew, and revered, as King Arthur.

About two feet to the right of the strange, scarlet inscription, and much closer to the water level, Chris soon spied a name of some kind - most likely an ancient Welsh name, he thought, - a signature, seemingly handwritten on the cave-entrance in a flowing, feminine style, not unlike that of Rhiannon’s, and done in the very same shade of red. The woman’s name, that Chris soon deciphered, he quickly concluded meant nothing to him at all; it read - ‘
Gwen Hwyfar.
’ But someone else - a male hand, he felt - had scrawled beneath it in black lettering, and this time in large brackets, the much more familiar name
GUINNEVERE
, and which a nodding Chris instantly understood to be, and to mean, one and the same.

When Carla met Sarah Havard in the bar of
‘The Riverside Studios’
in Hammersmith, (where she had been playing a free-concert that summer afternoon,) it was hardly love at first sight. For a start, the musician had another chick in tow with her at the time, a much younger, black girl, called Jackie Boyce, who soon informed the older, plainer, girl from Merthyr, whom she was not displeased to meet, that she was a proud single-mum, and had known Carla since Oxford.

‘Carla’s done her very best recently to be my daughter’s father, you know,’ the young girl had told Sarah with a wry smile, ‘and the press haven’t yet managed to cotton on to that. But people are forever telling me that every child needs a proper dad - a male one I mean, and the
actual
dad, if he’s up to it - and I guess one day that’s what we’ll do - her and me, me and Leila, I mean. Because Leila’s dad only lives just round the corner from here, you see, in Hammersmith.’ She drank up what remained of her glass of white wine and regarded the two Welsh women who shared her table, but whom she felt seemed to have virtually nothing else in common. ‘I’d be living with him now, only I’ve found that I can no longer stand the sight of him. My Leila happens to be with her grandma at the moment, if that’s what you’re wondering, Sarah.’